• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Is the "rich young man" a special case?

steve_bank said:
Sounds odd, I did not think ancient Jews had as highly developed images of hell as Christians do. I thought Dante influenced the Christian images of hell.
Click to expand...
They did not. Ancient Jews believed in a singular realm of the dead, to which everyone was ultimately fated to go, just as did all the other cultures of the ancient near east. Some believed that the dead would be resurrected on the Day of the Lord, but in the pre-Hellenistic era at least, the idea of there being multiple realms within the afterlife based on conduct was a foreign one to the Hebrews. By Jesus' time, there's some indirect evidence of complications. Greco-Egyptian ideas about Elysium and Hadys were creeping into public discourse in from the West and South, and Persian notions of divine purification in the afterlife were creeping in from the East. It's very difficult to say what Jesus himself might have believed, though it certainly wasn't the modern Christian perception of Hell, which would have been very anachronistic, and would have inspired more comment from other parties than we see in the Gospels and other early texts.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom